Sales and Marketing has evolved significantly over time going from the Barter System of 1000 years ago to Traditional Marketplaces, Seller’s Marketplaces, Conventional Mass-media Marketing, Fragmented New-age Marketing to today where Internet enabled business models have helped marketing evolved further.

In the past through our blogs, we’ve touched upon this evolution. In this blog, we will focus on the internet enabled modes of marketing specifically Facebook Marketing. With most customers now continuously spending their time online, businesses globally have understood the value of targeting them through the online mode. While the traditional methods of targeting i.e. TV, Radio, Newspapers etc. help is reaching to a larger audience fast, they are ineffective in terms of targeting a specific segment of the audience.

If a business wants to target a specific audience segment, you need to create a customer persona and then set-up filters to target and find the relevant audience. To target relevant audiences, Facebook helps you segment your audiences using these filters:

Location: Reach customers by City, Country, even Postcode

Demographics: Target people based on demographics like age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace and more

Interests: Define your ideal audience by their interests, hobbies and Pages they like on Facebook. This may be based on their listed interests, activities, education, job titles, Pages they like or groups to which they belong.

Behaviours: Reach people based on their purchasing behaviour, device usage and other activities

Besides these regular segments, Facebook has two advanced filters known as Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

Custom Audiences: Custom Audiences let you reach customers you already know with ads on Facebook. If you have developed a list of customer emails or acquired such customer data from your site, you can upload this list of email addresses or phone numbers to develop a custom audiences profile. Once you upload this list onto Facebook, you would be able to reach out to these customers on the facebook network and target them using your product advertisements. You can also build audiences from the people that visit your website or from people who use your mobile app. You can create a maximum of 10,000 Custom Audiences for those from your website or mobile app. Now while custom audiences might help you advertise to this list of audiences who have already purchased your product in the past, this is not really a good use of your investment as you can also target this audience by doing a simple (and almost free) email campaign. The real advantage of Custom Audiences is that it helps you expand your business over the Facebook network through Lookalike Audiences.

Lookalike Audiences: Lookalike Audiences helps you create new audiences based on traits from one of the following sources:

Custom Audiences: As we’ve seen before, you can upload a list of your existing customers using Custom Audiences. The benefit of this is that we can then use Lookalike Audiences to find people who resemble that audience. Since the custom audiences have already bought from you, Facebook would be able to match their interests, and other characteristics to get you a bigger audience with the same profile. This would help you reach out to a wider audience who are more likely to buy your product.

Website visitors: Like Google Adwords, Facebook also allows users to track visits to your website. You can install a Facebook Pixel on your site which would help facebook track the profile and behavior of this particular user. Then based on the profile of people visiting your website, we can create Lookalike Audiences to help you reach to a wider audience.

Page fans: People who like your brand’s page on Facebook are typical evangelists for your brand. Facebook allows you to use Lookalike Audiences to create an audience based on people who like your Page with the belief that the Lookalike Audiences will also exhibit similar behavior to this audience.

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